The Secret
Blue
The sky weeps big pelting drops on the window. Outside the brown leaps from the trees in a windswept blur. Here, inside, my mother reaches for my hand by feeling around on the bed covers as if she is blind. She cries out for me. The death grip pulls her hard, so she clings to my warmth with a Herculean strength. Her voice like a crocodile hiss. I have something to tell you I have never told anyone before. Intake of breath as I fall forward into the cerulean unknown.
Green
Her eyes so pale and deep set like a field of new clover darkened by shadows, now red rimmed and puffy. Tired of it all. She tells me she had five daughters - two she gave away, and I think this is the dementia laughing at me. Hospital walls of puke green tighten around us, and I try to correct her. No mom, It's just me and my sis, and the unwanted pregnancy before marriage. She has no patience for my interruption - the story unfolds before me like an artichoke heart.
Purple
Two alive, that's me and my sister. One long departed from a trash bin in Mexico City down some back alley in 1956 - a brief life interrupted at twelve weeks. Two, she says, created for a couple who couldn't have kids. She, the ripe plumb impregnated with a turkey baster with sperm from the fertile dad, not my dad, way before the term surrogate even existed. Twice she did this. For them. For my dad - to put him through graduate school. Not for herself. Never for herself. Behind my left ear I hear something pop inside my head. Blood purple placenta five times generated.
Orange
I hide in the sanctuary of my car. The hurricane rages around me - sheets of rain littering my windshield with leaves of rust, ginger, tiger and fire. While she sleeps, I drive mindlessly down dead-end streets decorated with Halloween pumpkins on porches. Can this be true? When I said Oh mom that must have been so hard for you, she said No, no it was easy really, in that dreamy distant way she has where she looks right through you into a world you will never know. She turned her head away and curled into a coiled oleander caterpillar.
Yellow
I'm stumbling around the aisles of Target in a daze with sunshine colored Pine Sol in my cart. I don't remember how I got here. Who can I call? Dad died six months ago. My sister is in China and it's 3 am in Tianjin. Somewhere on this planet are two women just slightly older than me, my half-sisters, walking around with no knowledge that their genetic mother is dying. Nothing makes sense. I push my cart into the sock isle and pick out bright lemon footies for mom's tiny bird-boned feet. Parts of me, parts of you, amber tone seagull bones.
White
The sky has melted and is running down my face so that my tears no longer taste of salt. All the Goth girls want the number of my stylist. Wet and dripping I reverse out of the parking space and almost run over an old man with a walker - I scream like a punctured tire and pound the steering wheel. When I close my eyes all I see is a blistering white starburst of rage. Why didn't she tell me sooner? Will I find the courage to ask her more? Stepping into the rehabilitation center, disinfectant mixed with feces hits my nose with a slap and the floorboards feel like quicksand parting under my feet. I am falling into a milky abyss.
Black
Spinning out into space, hurtling into the great unknown, sucked into a black hole where the truth has disappeared. Mom is sleeping. With this new knowledge, thinking of my parents' marriage, the odd comments - 'That Donna, you look at her sideways and she's pregnant!' - is like the distortion of a fun house mirror. Small town factory girl who ran away to the Big Apple, became a successful model only to give it all up to support her man. He owed her, big time. No one to question about this dark undisclosed act of martyrdom. My heart is scorched like a shrinking raisin. Three more hours and I can call my sister. Three days later she is gone. She died alone, just as she said she would. In the pitch black of midnight, she sailed away, without ever saying another word.
Nicole Farmer is a teacher living in Asheville, NC. Her poems have been published in The Closed Eye Open, Quiltkeepers Press, Capsule Stories, The Sheepshead Review, Roadrunner Review, Wild Roof Journal, Bacopa Literary Review, The Great Smokies Review, Kakalak Review, 86 Logic, Wingless Dreamer, and others. Her play 50 JOBS was produced in Los Angeles. Nicole has been awarded the First Prize in Prose Poetry from the Bacopa Literary Review, which will appear in Sept. 2021. Way back in the 90's she graduated from The Juilliard School of Drama. You can find her dancing barefoot in her driveway on the full moon at midnight.